Shibumi (27 page)

Not quite able to follow what was going on here, the PLO goatherd had risen from the conference table and strayed to the window, where he looked down and watched an ambulance with a flashing dome light thread its way through the partially congealed traffic—as that ambulance did every night at precisely this time. Starr’s colorful language had attracted his attention, and he was thumbing through his pocket English/Arabic dictionary, muttering, “Nookie… nookie…” when suddenly the Washington Monument and the wide avenue of cars vanished, and the window was filled with a blinding light.

The goatherd screamed and threw himself to the floor, covering his head in anticipation of the explosion.

Everyone in the room reacted characteristically. Starr leapt up and whipped out his Magnum. Miss Swivven slumped into a chair. The Deputy covered his face with a sheet of typing paper. Diamond closed his eyes and shook his head at these asses with which he was surrounded. Mr. Able examined his cuticles. And the First Assistant, absorbed in his technological intercourse with Fat Boy, failed to notice that anything had happened.

“Get off the floor, for chrissake,” Diamond said. “It’s nothing. The street-scene film has broken, that’s all.”

“Yes, but…” the goatherd babbled.

“You came down in the elevator. You must have known you were in the basement.”

“Yes, but…”

“Did you think you were looking down from the Sixteenth Floor?”

“No, but…”

“Miss Swivven, shut the rear projector off and make a note to have it repaired.” Diamond turned to Mr. Able. “I had it installed to create a better working environment, to keep the office from feeling shut up in the bowels of the earth.”

“And you have been capable of fooling yourself?” Starr snapped his gun back into its holster and glared at the window, as though to say it had been lucky…
this
time.

With ruminantial ambiguity, the goatherd grinned sheepishly as he got to his feet. “Boy-o-boy, that was a good one! I guess the joke was on me!”

Out in the machine room, Miss Swivven threw a switch, and the glaring light in the window went out, leaving a matte white rectangle that had the effect of sealing the room up and reducing its size.

“All right,” Diamond said, “now you have some insight into the man we’re dealing with. I want to talk a little strategy, and for that I would as soon have you two out of here.” He pointed Starr and the PLO goatherd toward the exercise and sun room. “Wait in there until you’re called.”

Appearing indifferent to his dismissal. Star ambled toward the sun room, followed by the Arab who insisted on explaining again that he guessed the joke had been on him.

When the door closed behind them, Diamond addressed the two men at the conference table, speaking as though the First Assistant were not present, as indeed in many ways he was not.

“Let me lay out what I think we ought to do. First—”

“Just a moment, Mr. Diamond,” Mr. Able interrupted. “I am concerned about one thing. Just what is your relationship to Nicholai Hel?”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, come now! It is evident that you have taken a particular interest in this person. You are familiar with so many details that do not appear in the computer printout.”

Diamond shrugged. “After all, he’s a mauve-card man; and it’s my job to keep current with—”

“Excuse me for interrupting you again, but I am not interested in evasions. You have admitted that the officer in charge of the interrogation of Nicholai Hel was your brother.”

Diamond stared at the OPEC troubleshooter for a second. “That’s right. Major Diamond was my brother. My older brother.”

“You were close to your brother?”

“When our parents died, my brother took care of me. He supported me while he was working his way through college. Even while he was working his way up through the OSS—a notoriously WASP organization—and later with CIA, he continued to—”

“Do spare us the domestic details. I would be correct to say that you were very close to him?”

Diamond’s voice was tight. “Very close.”

“All right. Now there is something you passed over rather quickly in your biographic sketch of Nicholai Hel. You mentioned that he required, as a part of his pay for doing the Peking assignment that got him out of prison, the current addresses of the three men involved in beating and torturing him during his interrogation. May I presume he did not want the addresses for the purpose of sending Christmas cards… or Hanukkah greetings?”

Diamond’s jaw muscles rippled.

“My dear friend, if this affair is as serious as you seem to believe it is, and if you are seeking my assistance in clearing it up, then I must insist upon understanding everything that might bear upon the matter.”

Diamond pressed his palms together and hooked the thumbs under his chin. He spoke from behind the fingers, his voice mechanical and atonic. “Approximately one year after Hel showed up in Indo-China, the ‘doctor’ who had been in charge of administering drugs during the interrogation was found dead in his abortion clinic in Manhattan. The coroner’s report described the death as accidental, a freak fall which had resulted in one of the test tubes he was carrying shattering and going through his throat. Two months later, the MP sergeant who had administered the physical aspects of the interrogation and who had been transferred back to the United States died in an automobile accident. He had evidently fallen asleep at the wheel and driven his car off the road and over a cliff. Exactly three months later, Major Diamond—then Lieutenant Colonel Diamond—was on assignment in Bavaria. He had a skiing accident.” Diamond paused and tapped his lips with his forefingers.

“Another freak accident, I suppose?” Mr. Able prompted.

“That’s right. As best they could tell, he had taken a bad jump. He was found with a ski pole through his chest.”

“Hm-m-m,” Mr. Able said after a pause. “So this is the way CIA protects its own? It must be quite a satisfaction for you to have under your control the organization that gave away your brother’s life as part of a fee.”

Diamond looked across at the Deputy. “Yes. It has been a satisfaction.”

The Deputy cleared his throat. “Actually, I didn’t enter the Company until the spring of—”

“Tell me something,” Mr. Able said. “Why haven’t you taken retributive action against Hel before now?”

“I did once. And I will again. I have time.”

“You did once? When was– Ah! Of course! Those policemen who surrounded that house in Los Angeles and opened fire half an hour before schedule! That was your doing?”

Diamond’s nod had the quality of a bow to applause.

“So there is some revenge motive in all of this for you, it would seem.”

“I’m acting in the best interest of the Mother Company. I have a message from the Chairman telling me that failure in this would be unacceptable. If Hel has to be terminated to assure the success of the Septembrists skyjacking then, yes, I shall take some personal satisfaction in that. It will be a life for a life, not, as in his case, three murders for one beating!”

“I doubt that he considered them murders. More likely he thought of them as executions. And if my guess is right, it was not the pain of the beatings that he was avenging.”

“What, then?”

“The
indignity
of them. That’s something you would have no way to understand.”

Diamond puffed out a short laugh. “You really imagine you know Hel better than I do?”

“In some ways, yes—despite your years of studying him and his actions. You see, he and I—accepting our cultural differences—are of the same caste. You will never see this Hel clearly, squinting as you do across the indefinite but impassable barrier of breeding—a great gulf fixed, as the Qoran or one of those books terms it. But let us not descend to personalities. Presumably you sent those two plebes from the room for some other reason than a desire to improve the quality of the company.”

Diamond was stiffly silent for a moment, then he drew a short breath and said, “I have decided to pay a visit to Hel’s place in the Basque country.”

“This will be the first time you have met him face to face?”

“Yes.”

“And you have considered the possibility that it may be more difficult to get out of those mountains than to get in?”

“Yes. But I believe I shall be able to convince Mr. Hel of the foolishness of attempting to assist Miss Stern. In the first place, there is no logical reason why he should take on this assignment for a misguided middle-class girl he doesn’t even know. Hel has nothing but disgust for amateurs of all kinds, including amateurs in terror. Miss Stern may see herself as a noble soldier in the service of all that is right in the world, but I assure you that Hel will view her as a pain in the ass.”

Mr. Able tilted his head in doubt. “Even assuming that Mr. Hel does look upon Miss Stern as a proctological nuisance (whether or not he reflects on the happy pun), there remains the fact that Hel was a friend of the late Asa Stern, and you have yourself said that he has strong impulses toward loyalty to friends.”

“True. But there are fiscal pressures we can bring to bear. We know that he retired as soon as he had accumulated enough money to live out his life in comfort. Mounting a ‘stunt’ against our PLO friends would be a costly matter. It’s probable that Hel is relying on the eventual sale of his Wyoming land for financial security. Within two hours, that land will no longer be his. All records of his having bought it will disappear and be replaced by proof that the land is held by the Mother Company.” Diamond smiled. “By way of fringe benefit, there happens to be a little coal on that land that can be profitably stripped off. To complete his financial discomfort, two simple cables to Switzerland from the Chairman will cause Hel’s money held in a Swiss bank to vanish.”

“And I imagine the money will turn up in Mother Company assets?”

“Part of it. The rest will be held by the banks as transactional costs. The Swiss are nothing if not frugal. It’s a Calvinist principle that there is an entrance fee to heaven, to keep the riff-raff out. It is my intention to perform these fiscally punitive actions, regardless of Hel’s decision to take or reject Miss Stern’s job.”

“A gesture in memory of your brother?”

“You may think of it that way, if you like. But it will also serve as a financial interdiction to Hel’s being a nuisance to the Mother Company and to the nations whose interest you represent.”

“What if money pressures alone are not sufficient to persuade him?”

“Naturally, I have a secondary line of action to address that contingency. The Mother Company will bring pressure upon the British government to spare no effort in protecting the Black Septembrists involved in the Munich Olympics debacle. It will be their task to make sure they are unmolested in their skyjacking of the Montreal plane. This will not require as much pressure as you might imagine because, now that the North Sea oil fields are producing, England’s economic interests are more closely allied to those of OPEC than to those of the West.”

Mr. Able smiled. “Frankly, I cannot imagine the MI-5 and MI-6 lads being an effective deterrent to Mr. Hel. The greater part of their energies are applied to writing imaginative memoirs of their daring exploits during the Second World War.”

“True. But they will have a certain nuisance value. Also, we shall have the services of the French internal police to help us contain Hel within that country. And we are moving on another front. It is inconceivable that Hel would try to enter England to put the Septembrists away without first neutralizing the British police. I told you that he does this by buying blackmail material from an information broker known as the Gnome. For years the Gnome has evaded international efforts to locate and render him dysfunctional. Through the good services of Her communications subsidiaries, the Mother Company is beginning to close in on this man. We know that he lives somewhere near the city of Bayonne, and we’re actively involved in tightening down on him. If we get to him before Hel does, we can interdict the use of blackmail leverage against the British police.”

Mr. Able smiled. “You have a fertile mind, Mr. Diamond—when personal revenge is involved.” Mr. Able turned suddenly to the Deputy. “Do you have something to contribute?”

Startled, the Deputy said, “Pardon me? What?”

“Never mind.” Mr. Able glanced again at his watch. “Let’s do get on with it. I assume you didn’t ask me here so you could parade before me your array of tactics and interdictions. Obviously, you need my help in the unlikely event that all the machines you have set into motion fail, and Hel manages to put the Septembrists away.”

“Exactly. And it is because this is a bit delicate that I wanted those two buffoons out of the room while we talked about it. I accept the fact that the nations you represent are committed to protecting the PLO, and therefore the Mother Company is, and therefore CIA is. But let’s be frank among ourselves. We would all be happier if the Palestinian issue (and the Palestinians with it) would simply disappear. They’re a nasty, ill-disciplined, vicious lot whom history happened to put in the position of a symbol of Arab unity. All right so far?”

Mr. Able waved away the obvious with his hand.

“Very well. Let’s consider our posture, should everything fail and Hel manage to exterminate the Septembrists. All that would really concern us would be assuring the PLO that we had acted vigorously on its behalf. Considering their barbaric nature, I think they would be mollified if we took vengeance on their behalf by destroying Nicholai Hel and everything he possesses.”

“Sowing the land with salt?” Mr. Able mused.

“Just so.”

Mr. Able was silent for a time, his eyes lowered as he tickled his upper lip with his forefinger. “Yes, I believe we can rely on the PLO’s sophomoric mentality to that degree. They would accept a major act of revenge—provided it was lurid enough—as proof that we are devoted to their interests.” He smiled to himself. “And do not imagine that it has escaped my notice that such an eventuality would allow you to slay two birds with one stone. You would solve the tactical problem at hand, and avenge your brother at one stroke. Is it possible that you would rather see all your devices fail and Nicholai Hel somehow break through and hit the Septembrists, freeing you to devise and execute a maximal punishment for him?”